Up Close and Personal: On Peripheral Perspectives and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge

By Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka

Combining rich personal accounts from twelve veteran anthropologists with reflexive analyses of the state of anthropology today, this book is a treatise on theory and method offering fresh insights into the production of anthropological knowledge, from the creation of key concepts to major paradigm shifts. Particular focus is given to how ‘peripheral perspectives’ can help re-shape the discipline and the ways that anthropologists think about contemporary culture and society. From urban Maori communities in Aotearoa/New Zealand to the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, from Arnhem Land in Australia to the villages of Yorkshire, these accounts take us to the heart of the anthropological endeavour, decentring mainstream perspectives, and revealing the intimate relationships and processes that create anthropological knowledge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780857458476

Book preview

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

Methodology and History in Anthropology

General Editor: David Parkin, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

Just as anthropology has had a significant influence on many other disciplines in recent years, so too have its methods been challenged by new intellectual and technical developments. This series is designed to offer a forum for debate on the interrelationship between anthropology and other academic fields but also on the challenge that new intellectual and technological developments pose to anthropological methods, and the role of anthropological thought in a general history of concepts.

Volume 1

Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute

Edited by Wendy James and N.J. Allen

Volume 2

Taboo, Truth and Religion

Franz B. Steiner

Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon

Volume 3

Orientpolitik, Value, and Civilization

Franz B. Steiner

Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon

Volume 4

The Problem of Context: Perspectives from Social Anthropology and Elsewhere

Edited by R.M. Dilley

Volume 5

Religion in English Everyday Life: An Ethnographic Approach

Timothy Jenkins

Volume 6

Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents, and Agency in Melanasia, 1870s–1930s

Edited by Michael O’Hanlon and Robert Welsch

Volume 7

Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research

Edited by Paul Dresch, Wendy James, and David Parkin

Volume 8

Categories and Classifications: Maussian Reflections on the Social

N.J. Allen

Volume 9

Louis Dumont and Hierarchical Opposition

Robert Parkin

Volume 10

Categories of Self: Louis Dumont’s Theory of the Individual

André Celtel

Volume 11

Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and Effects

Michael Jackson

Volume 12

An Introduction to Two Theories of Social Anthropology: Descent Groups and Marriage Alliance

Louis Dumont

Volume 13

Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau

Henrik E. Vigh

Volume 14

The Politics of Egalitarianism: Theory and Practice

Edited by Jacqueline Solway

Volume 15

A History of Oxford Anthropology

Edited by Peter Riviére

Volume 16

Holistic Anthropology: Emergence and Convergence

Edited by David Parkin and Stanley Ulijaszek

Volume 17

Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches

Edited by David Berliner and Ramon Sarró

Volume 18

Ways of Knowing: New Approaches in the Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning

Edited by Mark Harris

Volume 19

Difficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology

David Mills

Volume 20

Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification

Nigel Rapport

Volume 21

The Life of Property: House, Family, and Inheritance in Béarn, South-West France

Timothy Jenkins

Volume 22

Out of the Study and Into the Field: Ethnographic Theory and Practice in French Anthropology

Edited by Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales

Volume 23

The Scope of Anthropology: Maurice Godelier’s Work in Context

Edited by Laurent Dousset and Serge Tcherkézoff

Volume 24

Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology

Nigel Rapport

Volume 25

Up Close and Personal: On Peripheral Perspectives and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge

Edited by Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka

Volume 26

Understanding Cultural Transmission in Anthropology: A Critical Synthesis

Edited by Roy Ellen, Stephen Lycett and Sarah Johns

Volume 27

Durkheim in Dialogue: A Centenary Celebration of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

Edited by Sondra L. Hausner

Volume 28

Extraordinary Encounters: Authenticity and the Interview

Edited by Katherine Smith, James Staples and Nigel Rapport

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

On Peripheral Perspectives and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge

Edited by

Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka

First published in 2013 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2013, 2015 Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka

First paperback edition published in 2015

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Up close aclose and personal : on peripheral perspectives and the production of anthropological knowledge / edited by Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka.

    p. cm. — (Methodology and history in anthropology ; v.25)

ISBN 978-0-85745-846-9 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78238-042-9 (paperback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-85745-847-6 (ebook)

1. Anthropology—Methodology. 2. Knowledge, Sociology of. I. Shore, Cris, 1959– II. Trnka, Susanna.

GN33.U6 2013

301.01—dc23

2012032930

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper

ISBN: 978-0-85745-846-9 hardback

ISBN: 978-1-78238-042-9 paperback

ISBN: 978-0-85745-847-6 ebook

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface: Anthropologists Up Close and Personal

Acknowledgements

Introduction. Observing Anthropologists: Professional Knowledge, Practice and Lives

Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka

MICHAEL JACKSON

Chapter 1. Suffering, Selfhood and Anthropological Encounters

ANNE SALMOND

Chapter 2. Anthropology, Ontology and the Maori World

JOAN METGE

Chapter 3. Building Bridges: Maori and Pakeha Relations

GILLIAN COWLISHAW

Chapter 4. ‘Culture’, ‘Race’ and ‘Me’: Living the Anthropology of Indigenous Australians

NICOLAS PETERSON

Chapter 5. Finding One’s Way in Arnhem Land

HOWARD MORPHY

Chapter 6. Art as Action: The Yolngu

DAVID TRIGGER

Chapter 7. Rethinking Nature and Nativeness

CHRISTOPHER PINNEY

Chapter 8. More than Local, Less than Global: Anthropology in the Contemporary World

NELSON GRABURN

Chapter 9. Beyond Selling Out: Art, Tourism and Indigenous Self-representation

NIGEL RAPPORT

Chapter 10. Sovereign Individuals and the Ontology of Selfhood

SUSAN WRIGHT

Chapter 11. Hidden Histories and Political Transformations

MARILYN STRATHERN

Chapter 12. Gender Ideology, Property Relations and Melanesia: The Field of ‘M’

Conclusion. Looking Ahead: Past Connections and Future Directions

Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Michael Jackson with Jackamarra and Jampijinpa, at Paraluyu. Central Australia, 1990. (Photo courtesy of the author)

2. Ritharrngu-speaking brothers, wives, children and affines gathered together to sing in memory of a deceased relative. Central Arnhem Land, 1965. (Photo courtesy of the author)

3. David Trigger playing a recording to Garawa men of a deceased Waanyi man singing a dreaming route. Gulf Country, Australia, 1990. Gerald Wollogorang (centre) and Lenin Anderson (left). (Photo courtesy of Richard Martin)

4. Raghunath and the horse that cost Rs 70,000. 2010. (Photo courtesy of the author)

5. Goddess factory, Guna, Madhya Pradesh. 2009. (Photo courtesy of the author)

6. Nelson Graburn, in Kautchakuluk and Ikaujurapik’s tent, Kimmirut village, Hudson Strait. 1960. (Photo courtesy of the author)

7. Nelson Graburn, Ilisapi Kululak girl carrying her brother Jimmy in Kimmirut village, 1960. (Photo courtesy of the author)

8. Nigel Rapport in the field, Cumbria. (Photo courtesy of the author)

9. Susan Wright in her field site in Iran, 1976. (Photo courtesy of the author)

10. Susan Wright and Iranian villagers collaborating on participatory research, 1996. (Photo courtesy of the author)

11. Temporary accommodation for the visiting anthropologist, Kelua, Mt Hagen, 1964. (Photo courtesy of the author)

12. Marilyn Strathern with women and children at the edge of a ceremonial ground in Mbukl, Mt Hagen, 1964. (Photo courtesy of the author)

Preface

ANTHROPOLOGISTS UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

This book originated from a series of conversations and debates about the nature of social anthropological enquiry and knowledge production with some of the discipline’s leading and most innovative figures in New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom. What the volume offers are twelve highly personal yet structured accounts of anthropologists as authors and practitioners, their key discoveries, what attracted them to anthropology, how they have helped to shape the discipline, and in turn, how the discipline has shaped their works and lives. The result is a series of candid, first-person narratives that reveal something quite intimate and profound about the nature of the anthropological endeavour. In the pages that follow our contributors examine a range of key issues including the ethics and politics of activism; how anthropological knowledge is made (and what counts as ‘anthropological’ knowledge); what distinguishes anthropology as a way of seeing and engaging with the world; how anthropology’s self-understanding and professional identity is changing; the nature of ‘discovery’ and how lived experience is transformed into ethnographic and scientific data; and how the discipline reproduces itself and the role of personalities and personal relationships in that process.

While each of the twelve individuals in this book offers a uniquely rich and personal account of what it means to be an anthropologist, taken as a whole these accounts shed light on wider epistemic and sociological forces that have defined, and continue to define, the past, present and future trajectories of social anthropology. Reflecting on these processes, the accounts offered up by the authors in this book provide a panorama of the life and times in which we live and the history of the discipline, particularly from the viewpoint of the antipodes.

In putting together this book, we have striven to capture a sense of the intimacy that characterised our initial conversations. Our aim is to offer the reader a somewhat different perspective on the work of anthropology than can normally be found in a textbook or academic article. We wanted to convey some of our authors’ more personal and informal reflections to shed light on how major concepts in the discipline came into being and to give a sense of the personalities and subjective experiences that invariably underlie the typically more formal and polished products of ethnographic enquiry. Like Oliver Cromwell, we invited our authors to present a ‘warts and all’ portrait of their professional selves and lives. Whether they have lived up to that challenge is for the reader to judge.

Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka

Auckland, 2013

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Dr Rolf Husman of Documentary Educational Resources, who helped us carry out some of the original interviews in Auckland. Thanks are also due to Richard Smith and Neil Morrison of the University of Auckland for technical assistance in the television studio’s recording and editing room; to Alison Palmer for research assistance; and to Laura McLauchlan for transcription. We owe a particular debt of gratitude to John Michael Correll who managed to transform some of the archaic fieldwork photographs into digitally enhanced high quality images for this book. We also wish to acknowledge Dean Carruthers and Godfrey Boehnke for the portrait photographs of Anne Salmond and Joan Metge, respectively. We would also like to thank Elizabeth Berg at Berghahn for making the final production process so easy. Finally, we wish to thank our anthropology colleagues in New Zealand and in Denmark where some of the ideas for this book were presented as conference papers.

Introduction

OBSERVING ANTHROPOLOGISTS Professional Knowledge, Practice and Lives

Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka

Anthropologists are experts at studying cultural ‘others’ and, in the process, elucidating hidden aspects of their own society. These twin perspectives have typically been seen as the aim of good ethnographic writing. This book reverses the analytical lens to focus on the anthropologists themselves: their works, lives and subjective encounters in the field and beyond. In doing so, it explores the relationship between personal experience and knowledge production, taking us behind some of the key concepts that have shaped the discipline, both its past and its present. The anthropological encounter not only changes our ideas about the world and provides a lens for understanding other people’s worlds; as the narrative accounts in this book show, it can also fundamentally change who we are.

This book sets out to answer four key questions that are practical, political and epistemological in nature. First, what exactly is it that distinguishes anthropology as a professional practice and as a way of seeing and knowing the world? Second, how has the discipline changed in the past forty years, and does the geographical location of its practitioners affect the ways anthropology is practiced? Third, what are the most exciting innovations and directions that are reshaping anthropology today, and where have these ideas come from? And fourth, how do anthropologists engage with the urgent problems facing societies around the world, and how do they understand that engagement? In addressing these questions, we also hope to illuminate broader issues, including the constitution and reproduction of the discipline, the shifting identity of anthropology as a profession, its applications and its ethical entanglements.

There have been a number of works that have tried to shed light, in one way or another, on the practice of social anthropology. Many of these have highlighted the practice of fieldwork as the pillar of anthropology (Sanjek 1990: Borneman and Hammoudi 2009); others have explored anthropology as a form of writing, deconstructing the literary tactics and artifice of writing ethnography (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988). Still others, following the literary turn of the 1980s and calls for more self-reflexive accounts (Marcus and Cushman 1982), have adopted the genres of personal memoirs and ‘confessional’ writing (Nordstrom and Robben 1996; Coffey 1999; De Neve and Unnithan-Kumar 2006; Collins and Gallinat 2010). Most of these texts focus exclusively on fieldwork experiences. Sometimes they have been highly personal and often (embarrassingly) revealing; for example, Paul Rabinow’s ‘sensual interactions’ with prostitutes in Morocco, which, he informs us, ‘seemed to be too good to be true’ (1977: 65, 69); Peter Wade’s account (1993) of the sexual motivations that led him to do ethnographic research in Colombia; or Kenneth Good’s (1991) romantic tale of ‘going native’ among the Yanomami in Venezuela. While these accounts have provided some valuable insight into the processes of anthropological knowledge formation, like most autobiographies, they tend to be selective and skewed towards the concerns of their authors. As observant critics have often noted, an autobiography typically reveals nothing bad except the author’s memory and vanity. In a similar vein, there have been a number of fascinating anthologies of anthropologists’ personal accounts of their relationships with key informants (Casagrande 1960; Watson 1999; see also Dumont 1978). Some of these accounts are humorous and self-deprecatory and are aimed at a more general public audience (Barley 1983); others are fictional narratives that set out to lampoon the practices of the anthropologist (Parkin 1986; Lodge 1991; McCall-Smith 2005, 2006a, 2006b; see also MacClancy 2005).

This book differs in three important ways. First, our concern is to examine the practice of anthropology in its wider sense. Anthropology as a profession is not simply a matter of ‘doing fieldwork’ or ‘writing ethnography’; it also includes teaching, social activism and performing the role of public intellectual. These are not simply add-on components to practising anthropology; rather, in this book we demonstrate the close and dynamic relationship between these different dimensions, including how activism and teaching shape our fieldwork experiences and anthropological sensibilities. Second, our aim is to understand how the major theoretical tropes and paradigms that have influenced contemporary social anthropology have arisen not only through fieldwork, but as a result of other personal, historical and scholarly influences. And third, the process of creating these personal histories and narrative accounts is deliberately different from that of most of the works cited above. Rather than inviting contributors to send us their unmediated autobiographical musings and reflections on their own experiences, we met with them personally and led them through a set of semi-structured questions that sought to tease out the connections between personal history, intellectual influences and disciplinary formation. As a result, their answers were spontaneous and unrehearsed. Even though they later had a chance to revise their contributions, the resulting chapters strive to maintain the informality and conversational style of our interviews. Perhaps more important, this approach meant that our contributors were often asked to speak to topics that they may not have chosen themselves – sometimes putting people on the spot by asking questions that took them outside of their comfort zones. In a curious sense, our authors thus also became our ‘informants’. Much like the collaborative process of ethnographic fieldwork, we engaged with them to elicit answers to the questions that we found most compelling. This represents a very different and perhaps uniquely ‘hybrid’ genre of anthropological writing – not quite an ‘anthropology of anthropologists’ (Kuper 1996) but somewhere between raw interview and reflexivity; autobiography and collaborative analysis (Fluehr-Lobben 2008); or between emic and etic perspectives on one’s own professional practice. This also enabled us to look across the interviews to draw out unifying themes and key differences that highlight not only individual idiosyncrasies, but also generational patterns, national contexts and career trajectories.

The twelve individuals who are featured in this book have all dedicated a large part of their professional and personal lives to anthropology. Many of them are at the cutting edges of their respective fields: scholars whose work and writings have transformed anthropology as a discipline and who have inspired subsequent generations of students both nationally and internationally. Many of them have also had careers that span different countries, acting as public intellectuals and engaging in the major concerns that occupy anthropologists – and policy makers – in different settings. While not intended to be representative of particular national traditions, their work necessarily reflects some of the major intellectual currents and socio-economic and political changes that have occurred not only in New Zealand, Australia and Britain, but in the discipline on a global scale. By exploring their individual works and lives, we aim to grasp some of the wider social and contextual changes that are occurring within the discipline, as well as within academia as a whole. Our authors also both reflect, and reflect upon, some of the generational shifts that have occurred in anthropology, from the 1950s, when Joan Metge and Nelson Graburn embarked on their studies, to the 1980s, when Christopher Pinney and Nigel Rapport received their doctorates. These accounts thus offer a glimpse into the ways in which the discipline produces and reproduces itself or, more precisely, how its practitioners remake the profession. Significantly, the early education and training of these authors reflects much more the influence of the British tradition of social anthropology, with its focus on social structures and social relations, than the North American tradition of cultural anthropology, with its characteristic concern with debates around meaning and symbolism (Kuper 1999; Spencer 2000). If one of our goals was to understand what has happened to that British anthropological tradition once it was exported to the colonies, another goal was to examine how practitioners in the so-called periphery have engaged with and redefined that legacy and the intellectual contributions that peripheries can make to challenging and rethinking the established normative orders and assumptions that emanate from the centre.

The Value of ‘Peripheral Visions’

A major rationale for this book was to examine the relationship between knowledge production and anthropological location as understood in a broader sense than simply fieldwork (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Our aim was to explore the extent to which the discipline of social anthropology in two post-colonial settler societies (Australia and New Zealand) differs from its counterparts in Britain’s mainstream metropolitan centres. We have a personal stake in this question having both grown up and undergone much of our own professional training in anthropology in what could be described as the metropolitan centres of the discipline (Britain and the United States, respectively). Having both resettled in New Zealand in the last ten years, we continue to be struck both by the differences, yet more so by the continuities that define the discipline and practice of anthropology in these distinctive locales. Australia and New Zealand are often perceived to be on the periphery of global academic knowledge production. While the term ‘periphery’ may be viewed as a Eurocentric way of framing the issue, it is nonetheless useful for distinguishing between the financially well-endowed universities in the Northern Hemisphere’s core metropolitan centres and universities in more marginalized sites. One important observation that arises from our authors’ accounts is the rich intellectual cross-fertilization that occurs between core and peripheral sites in academia. This is partly a reflection of the increased movement of academics in the ever-more globalized world of academia, with New Zealand in particular having one of the most international academic labour forces in the world (Bonisch-Brednich 2010). The traffic works both ways, however. It would be impossible to attempt to draw national boundaries around the work and influence of antipodean anthropologists such as Raymond Firth, Roger Keesing, Bruce Kapferer, Michael Taussig, Michael Jackson or Anne Salmond. Moreover, most of these authors have spent substantial parts of their careers shifting to and from their countries of origin.

Nonetheless, New Zealand and Australia also provide specific contexts in which anthropology has developed, and they have given rise to several distinctive domestic concerns, from debates over post-colonial identities and subjectivities and the politics of indigeneity to applied anthropology and questions of ownership, appropriation and land rights (as we explore below). Antipodean perspectives have contributed more broadly to mainstream anthropology in various ways. As well as producing leading scholars, the Pacific region has given rise to many key concepts and distinctive disciplinary themes, including those of political leadership, chiefs and big men; gift-exchange and reciprocity; the politics of apology and post-colonial reconciliation; indigenous identity and rights; cultural genocide and the politics of forced assimilation; and theories of adolescence and childhood. As our contributors demonstrate, Australian and New Zealand anthropologists have contributed substantially to these debates, their development and, in particular, to their application.

Anthropology in New Zealand has also been the scholarly training ground for a number of leading Maori public figures, political and social activists, and intellectuals, including Robert Mahuta, Pita Sharples, Sir Hugh Kawharu, Ranginui Walker and Pat Hohepa. These leaders have all championed Maori rights and have been part of the movement that has gained wide public recognition for Maori culture with the result that te reo Maori (the Maori language) is taught in many public schools and that the New Zealand government now funds a Maori-language television station. There are also preschools (kōhanga reo), higher education institutions (wānanga) and alternative approaches to penal reform based on Maori cultural principles. While it has by no means overcome the inequalities created by its colonial legacy, New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi partnership arrangement is often cited as an example of a more successful approach to indigenous-settler relations.

There is a long-held anthropological ideal of using voices from the margins to critique the core, or as Marcus and Fischer put it (1999: 138), bringing ‘the insights gained on the periphery back to the centre to raise havoc with our settled ways of thinking and conceptualisation’. In the antipodes, the perspectives of indigenous peoples have gone a long way in challenging the assumptions of Eurocentric thinking. However, as Maori scholars and activists argue, this process could be taken much further, particularly in the areas of land rights and social justice (Smith 1999; Muru-Lanning 2010; Mutu 2011; Kawharu 2011). As Justice Eddie Durie notes (2011: 135), ‘While both of New Zealand’s founding cultures are passionate about property rights and expound the need to respect them, they differ on what those rights are.’ He concludes that considerable work is still needed ‘to close the gap in cultural comprehension’.

The subversive potential of peripheral perspectives may have an even greater transformative role. Using the metaphor of ‘peripheral vision’ in astronomy, June Nash (2001) has argued that sometimes the only way to see an object of study (like the cluster of stars known as the Pleiades) is to stare beyond it and catch a glimpse of the whole.

If we look straight ahead with the tunnel vision of disciplines that concentrate on core institutions in the centres of global power, we miss the manifold processes known as globalization that occur on the margins. These core institutions are so intertwined with regional, national and local clusters that it is difficult, if not impossible, to perceive the macro formations. (Nash 2001: 15)

Like Nash, we suggest that an added dimension of the intellectual value of perspectives from countries like Australia and New Zealand arises precisely from their marginal positions. In much the same way as the ‘upside-down’ (or ‘south-up’) map compels us to recognize the taken-for-granted bias towards the Northern Hemisphere – and its attendant psychological effects (Meier et al 2011) – so views from the periphery can help to dislodge the normative values and assumptions inherent in Eurocentric perspectives. The value of peripheral viewpoints is borne out in much of the anthropological scholarship on the cultures of colonialism (Dirks 1992; Thomas 1995), and in the anthropology of post-colonialism (Werbner 2012, globalization and neoliberalization, and ‘supply chain capitalism’ (Tsing 2009) and citizenship (Partridge 2011). That process of foregrounding perspectives from the margins is largely what characterizes anthropology’s keystone method of ethnographic fieldwork.

Professions and Identities: Anthropology as Seen from Within and Without

Ever since Malinowski, the most notable defining feature of social anthropology has been that of an individual embarking upon cross-cultural fieldwork. The idea of knowledge gained from empathetic understanding derived from long-term immersion in a different cultural milieu – be it in the Amazonian rainforest, a remote village in Africa or a small South Sea island on the brink of cultural extinction – has long been a central motif in both anthropological practice and representations of the discipline (Kuklick 2011). The romantic figure of Bronislaw Malinowski spending years living and working in seeming harmony with the Trobriand Islanders both epitomized and set the bar for what proper anthropological field research should entail – notwithstanding the disclosures about his personal life that came to light following the posthumous publication of his private diaries (Malinowski 1967).

All professions seem to acquire an external image which, however inaccurate it may be, substantially influences the people engaged in that field. In some cases this may also be a key factor in why individuals embark upon a career in that discipline. The allures of being a supermodel, famous musician, professional athlete – or nowadays a celebrity chef – are readily apparent; these careers appear to need little or no explanation. However misunderstood they may be in practice, these professions – like those of doctors, teachers and police officers – are instantly recognizable and enjoy a certain kudos. By contrast, those who work in what might be termed the ‘knowledge industries’ are harder to classify, as their work is neither particularly visible nor widely recognized. For example, most anthropologists can recount umpteen occasions when their response to the question ‘So what do you do for a living?’ has produced bafflement.

Anthropology as a profession seems to conspicuously lack serious public recognition. Or if it does enjoy notoriety, it is usually for the wrong reasons. The popular public image of anthropology has been shaped largely by negative stereotypes or romanticized caricatures. Among the most pervasive of these are the anthropologist as eccentric boffin and merchant in exotica; neo-colonialist and pith-helmeted butterfly collector; permanent tourist or deranged Westerner who sadly ‘went native’; or government spy and intruder into other people’s privacy. Perhaps a more appealing but equally problematic image is that of the anthropologist-as-hero. This trope includes popular figures such as Indiana Jones or the forensic scientists who feature prominently in popular television police dramas like CSI, Bones and Cold Case. Other less heroic but nonetheless appealing figures include Scarlett Johannson’s rendition of the anthropologist-cum-accidental nanny in The Nanny Diaries or the young protagonist in the popular drama Fierce People, who models himself on his famous but distant anthropologist father by examining social relations among a rich and eccentric New Jersey family. These populist depictions invariably trade on images of anthropologists’ engagement with the eccentric, the exotic and the seemingly ‘primitive’ Other. While these portrayals might seem unconvincing to most professional anthropologists, anecdotal evidence suggests that many students are drawn to the discipline by their allure. Indeed, a number of the contributors to this volume admit that their initial attraction to anthropology arose from its promise of exotica.

The question of what attracts individuals to anthropology – and what kinds of individuals are drawn to it – is important, because it raises issues that lie at the heart of this book, i.e. the sense in which anthropology entails a foray into other people’s lives and worlds and the implications of that engagement for the people themselves, for anthropologists, and for the development of knowledge about our own and other cultures. How some of the leading practitioners in the discipline came to anthropology was one of the questions we wanted to answer, as it set the stage for understanding what anthropology is all about. To what extent have any of these external images influenced people to take up a career in anthropology?

The personal accounts in this book are not intended to be representative of the discipline as a whole, but they do, nonetheless, provide rich and instructive insights into the factors that have influenced people’s decisions to devote their lives to this endeavour. What unites the authors in this book is the extent to which practicing anthropology is experienced as a vocation; i.e. not just an occupation and a profession but a mission and a passion. As Max Weber (1948: 84) famously wrote in his essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’, ‘He who lives for politics makes politics his life, in an internal sense’. In similar vein, the authors in this book have shaped their lives around anthropology and have, in turn, had their lives reshaped by the discipline in a manner reminiscent of a ‘calling’. And yet, for most of them, discovering anthropology came about largely by accident. Perhaps that itself is indicative of the ambiguity surrounding anthropology as a profession. This sense of the incidental and ephemeral nature of anthropology is well captured in Lévi-Strauss’s autobiographical work, Tristes Tropiques. ‘Anthropology’, he wrote, is ‘an ambiguous enterprise, oscillating between a mission and a refuge’. The ethnographer strives to understand other people’s worlds both from intimate and distanced perspectives:

The conditions of his life and work cut him off from his own group for long periods together; and he himself acquires a kind of chronic uprootedness from the sheer brutality of the environmental changes to which he is exposed. Never can he feel himself at home anywhere: he will always be, psychologically speaking, an amputated man. Anthropology is, with music and mathematics, one of the few true vocations; and the anthropologist may become aware of it within himself before ever he has been taught it. (Lévi-Strauss 1961: 58)

Many of our authors echo Lévi-Strauss’s description of anthropology as something they felt attracted to even before they understood what it was (an entrée into other worlds or alien modes of thought? An escape from their own reality? A chance to discover – or remake – oneself?) Most anthropologists, however, would not share Lévi-Strauss’s hyperbole or his pessimistic portrayal of the psychological impact of anthropological fieldwork. Nor would they share his assumption that anthropology can be discovered within oneself, even without any formal teaching or training. The reasons how and why people come to anthropology are both complex and subjective. Sociological factors also play an important role in drawing people to the discipline.

Coming to Anthropology

From the narrative accounts in this book we can deduce several distinct trajectories into anthropology. As mentioned, for several of our authors, discovering the discipline seemed to occur largely by accident. Part of the reason for that is almost certainly because anthropology is not taught in the mainstream school curriculum. It therefore retains a certain aura of mystery, as well as enticement about it. However, many were drawn to the discipline as a result of early childhood encounters with cultural ‘others’, experiences which had fuelled a fascination with different cultural worlds. For some, particularly Salmond, Jackson and Gillian Cowlishaw, those alternate worlds held out a promise of escape from their own seemingly dry and mundane cultural universes – even an opportunity to remake oneself. For others, particularly Marilyn Strathern and Susan